


a double dream

by gogollescent



Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-04
Updated: 2015-08-04
Packaged: 2018-04-12 21:32:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,861
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4495497
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gogollescent/pseuds/gogollescent
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She came through the night like a stone, hurled across leagues. He only knew that she had wings when she struck the deck.</p>
            </blockquote>





	a double dream

She came through the night like a stone, hurled across leagues. He only knew that she had wings when she struck the deck.

He was unexpectedly on his knees beside the tiller. He reached out, and she came into his arms: not easily, but with a great and breathless struggle, as though she sought to press them both out of the groove of time. Into dead white nothing. Instantly he was tired, then consumed; he couldn’t bear up under the frantic weight of wrenching, half-inch spasms, curt and strange. The wings went everywhere, under and over his arms. Webbed feet battled high on his stomach. He had never done this to an animal. He had not done it to his children. He felt, almost as accomplished pleasure, what it might be to release her, in a clear unknotting of the moment’s too-tight braid: expansive energy, a rush of ease, his arms succored by emptiness. Her rise.

He didn’t do it. The wet stink of feathers was horrible. The eye shone close and mad as break of day. Somehow kindness would have been worse—or at least, was not permitted him.

And after a moment the gull in fact calmed. It fell against his breast, larger than any natural bird.

There were shouts and a patter of running footsteps. She had made a bad noise on impact, though none after; his companions must fear a minor collision. Falathar climbed through the hatch, face a bald spot in the gloom, formless and yet sharply drawn for the hour: Eärendil came to a few of his senses, and traced the light to the star at her wishbone. This wonder seemed to smile through the skin and rumpled down. A light whose texture, firm caress, he would have known from the wrong side of a door: would have sought it, though iron stood against him.

“Take the helm,” he said, shutting his eyes. Two red moons. “Speak to the others, if they wake. Tell them…” He drew himself up, cradling the jewel in its shell, and pictured his wife’s neck.

That night he slept deeply on the floor of his cabin, afraid that in the narrow bunk he would suffocate his guest. Though maybe Fëanor’s stone would preserve her. Elwing had once asserted that as a child, fleeing the wrack of Doriath, they had hidden her in the river, as the one bright den in that dusk-dyed forest; had waited there for the remnants of Maedhros’ troops to pass by. The Silmaril’s drowned rays pulled on the dull glove of the moon; Elwing floated under the surface, among reeds. So said Elwing, with decisive crispness, which fell just shy of chosen irony. She had managed memory into a charm against doubt. And why not? If Eärendil could think of a few other explanations for the incident—something gone wrong while fording the river; a misstep made while bathing?—he did not contest that she had sunk. Bubbles had streamed from her mouth, and the brilliant roof that water made had forced low her dark head. The jewel, warm at her throat, had simply… What? She said: filled my mouth with light. The stems of the rushes, shot with gold and stapled to black glass at their roots and their tips—the taste of air, wet though not unavailing.

That thought led him by a hand-high rope to blue-green blighted Balar. Sunburnt water, entirely unlike the crystal hall in the riverbed: water flayed and bleeding from the heat, water deeply stripped of its persuasive, mirrored hide. Down and through. His wife kissing the Silmaril, wishing again to unlock its stern life: the Nauglamír’s links must have pinched at her throat, and around her, ink-fine, would have risen her hair.

Did something guide her body to the surface when it died? Something like the voice that had whined in his father as wind in a cave; or like the force that had drawn back at last from Turgon’s fountains?

And then—imagination failed. A bird had pecked out its heart to make room for the load. Or a bird had been made. A bearer, carved of foam.

When he woke it was to the ticklish slide of her hair against his cheek. An accustomed delight, encroached on by accustomed drought; he thought, that’s wrong, I’m not home yet, I smell Vingilot’s timbers. Then stopped. Thought little. His pulse yanked at one eyelid. Would he rather have been blind?

She lay on her side, head pillowed on an outstretched, gracious arm. A studied pose, redone in nerveless clay: long limbs sprawled loose, retracted, then slipped further. She barely resembled the seagull, unless it was that her shoulders hunched under an expectation of plumage. In fact he was not sure the wings were gone entirely: though she was slender, even beyond what he’d memorized, he thought she might—in a minute—shudder sweetly and unroll.

The necklace was twisted around to one side. Cupped between hair and jaw, its pendant turned her black hair red.

“Elwing.”

Nothing. Feeling foolish, grateful, angry and afraid, he shook her arm.

“Kill them,” she said. A bird’s dry call. “Gaerys! Burst thy banks!”

She sat up so quickly that he found he had sat with her. They stared at one another. Her mouth opened in soft, quick-set surprise. “I was sure you were,” he began, and she said, as though moving down a list: “They took them. Elrond. Elros. The Havens are dead.”

He let go. This time there were no consequences, freeing or otherwise; she took his hands, kissed them, and he was summoned back. To touch her as he could, to comb her salt-starred hair. It felt disgusting. The porthole’s stump of sky spilled grey shavings onto the floor of his cabin: every time he blinked, that was the knife. He tried to put himself quietly back into the ruin of his parents’ settlement, and then again to listen. She talked slowly; she was working, perhaps, to undo monstrous damage through sparing, careful speech, feeding four or five words into the crater where their home had stood, where a friend had fought. Trusting that the phrase would sprout and recreate its absent parent; or else would stand, would cover, would mark the chink and so preserve.

The moment she said they were gone, he had believed her, too completely: he had been trying for days to sail back against fair winds, he had expected disaster—had been scorched by the Silmaril’s tolerant nearness as by praise from his victim. It should have been evil enough to survive his wife. And by such means he made ready to level the Havens, in thought. He saw them roofless, bleached white, overrun. Only when she said, “And if Círdan comes, it will be too late,” did he edit in those who must be left, foraging among corpses; and who might argue. When she said, “Captives or dead, by this time, and alone,” he raised the twins’ heads up from where his flat despair had bowed them: breathed life into their image, and saw their eyes widen in fear.

Then she wept. “I’m hungry,” she said, “of all the—”; he sprang up, cursing himself. Aerandir was taking inventory in the hold. He had most probably heard from Falathar that the captain was indisposed courtesy of a bird; he greeted Eärendil with the queasy eye of a man checking for euphemisms. Eärendil almost shook him. For Elwing he retrieved waybread, smoked ham, dried fruit, a tin cup of fresh water. Aerandir said, “Embezzlement at last?” and Eärendil laughed aloud, through the recent rind of tears. He was coldly happy: happy in ripples as he walked, or skittered, back to his wife, such that each ring of gladness foundered under its own weight, and was usurped by a clear pulse from somehow deeper in. When he re-entered the cabin he saw that she felt the same, or near enough to it, under what distracted hunger grasped and straightened out her gaze. She ate and he stroked her back, going in lines, in circles, in circles and in rows.

“Maglor,” she said, when she had finished the scraps.

“Sorry?”

“He cornered me. Before I jumped.” She had explained, in far-flung pieces, how it was she came to be at Ulmo’s unforeseeably elastic mercy. The fall and change. Eärendil searched with an idle hand for wisps of down between the floorboards, but everything that she had been seemed to have gone back into her. He had to locate quill-points in the texture of her neck, and a beak’s insistent gilding on smooth nails, eyes, and hands. It wasn’t such a surprise. The bird had been much smaller than the woman, than the gift.

“He said—” a short, disbelieving, thinly tender laugh, not different from that which she otherwise used on herself and the twins’ misbehavior—though a laugh that rarely stung Eärendil, whom she met with sincerity, always, as an honored guest “—he said that I could raise my children. Under _their_ protection.”

The Silmaril yellowed at her throat. It was playing with the dawn. Fair curls against ash: so had Idril teased Tuor, once.

“He must be mad. If he thought you’d be taken in by…”

“He expects too much of his mighty voice,” she said. “He never heard Daeron sing.”

Neither had she. After this, he said to himself, consoled, I’ll never leave her. Endless respite. The last time he had been convinced of such a thing was after his first or second voyage to an enchanted archipelago, when he returned to find her ill with grief, seven months pregnant. He had been afraid she would die. Neither of them knew what they were: there were lines around his eyes that no elf had, and she was older. When she lived, why, there was his answer! He had eagerly formulated a set of new beliefs: that they would endure together, and be fortunate, and his parents would pass from the world unhounded, and the hand of the sea that had drawn him back would loose him, finally, had already loosed him—had left him quivering but embedded in his home. Shaking and growing blunt. Later, he would know those things for shame.

 _This_ was unlike it. He wasn’t sure of himself; part of him thought, _if Ulmo acted, then Valinor is within reach at last._ There no promise waited except one, which he could not beg, or pray, to avert. But below the sheeny tideline of his hopes—impossible to build on, or represent as one curve—there lived the stranger knowledge that because Ulmo had acted, they could not turn back. How much ancient magic had gone into perching his wife here, with her back to a bulkhead, the better to lick crumbs of ham off her fingers—as unconcerned with pitch and roll as if she sat on solid ground. Maybe she did, compared to the fretful repose of flight.

Not that seasickness had been what stayed Elwing from sailing. They could not circle back toward Middle-earth, Eärendil thought, more coolly. And then: I had best change our heading. They were no more than a hundred miles from the coast. A day, two days, and they would have had to disembark—if the rain had not stopped, they would have padded through mud and a veil, not two days after she had plunged from the sky like a star… But no. It was not different from death, in that regard. Something bright had reached down and pinched off the rest of her life, with its mundanities, rights, disappointments; the gleaming wire that now stretched forward bore no great likeness to the ore.

Except that she was dozing off a little. And the breath whistled through her nose, stuffed up from crying. It was still too easy to walk the forest with her in his mind, shouting for their sons. The rain. The crunch underfoot. No. He would follow her, of course. He would bear what he could of her fate.

“He was covered in blood,” Elwing said, dreamily, more alert than he’d guessed. “It clung to the armor. It dripped off his cloak. I wanted to kill him. No, to hurt him: something simple, with a spear. And also I kept thinking of the sentries, when they came back from the northern raids—absolutely drenched—I almost offered him a chair.”

Changed beyond chance at the moment of descent. He saw her, too, breathing in the lost, breathing out white-pinioned words.

*

She came up to the deck near noon, and his three companions flinched from her. He hadn’t prepared them well enough; she was a lens and a wraith in the sun. He had never before seen, though never doubting, the stamp of the divine in Elwing, even or especially when she wore her father’s jewel to the court of the Havens, where it made her seem wholesome and young, a faceless blur of energy. Now divinity appeared: as shrunken prettiness hollowed out from beneath, and as light that ate slowly, through a prismatic mouth. Also as feathered edges, a plain gown, a steady, if frightened, assessing stare: her expression was much clearer above the-Silmaril-at-sea. Here the jewel seemed to exult in the crossed translucencies of wave and sky, as much as in the quantities of post-storm light to vie with.

Or perhaps _it_ was what had driven off the storm. He held out a hand to her; she took it, and took his other hand, and spun him into an impromptu waltz. It must have been Aerandir who burst into wild laughter—while Falathar leaned against the rail with an air of satisfaction, and Erellont, at the helm, began to clap. He couldn’t have pronounced on it. He was busy. He looked intently at her shining face, because he could not look away. He half-thought, while he was transfixed, to mark the signs of pain, and map her reformed features; but she was concentrating on the dance, and he went with her. Clap, clap, clap, clap. She stopped in the middle of a turn, and he hiccuped. There was something trying to escape his chest: maybe a town.

“A desperate errand, gentlemen,” she said, turning to the horizon. She was working to sound dry, and sounded sober. “But I have something that may help.”

She held his gaze. They had talked it through: she was superstitious, he faithless. The story about the Silmaril’s power that he had held onto so tightly—yes, she had overheard his late-night reverie—was insubstantial next to the truth of her person. Was it? Do you think Ulu intervened to place _me_ aboard this vessel? I know he did, because when I first laid eyes on the gem, all I saw was proof that you were lost to me. Clearly decent couriers are harder to come by than you suppose—even for the gods. My dear, what decent courier cavils so much?

But the light of Aman was Aman. If he chased it, she said, he must consent to its use.

He nodded to her now, and knelt. She seemed surprised, despite negotiations; she unhooked the Nauglamír slowly, light and corners of arrogant shadow unpeeling from her face like a mask. He had expected her to put it around his neck. To his consternation, she instead arranged it garland-fashion on his hair, with her hand closed about the jewel: so that all he could detect was the molten red of her fingers, carded through by lines of flame. Then even that was taken back. The Silmaril settled over his brow.

He should have been blinded. For a while he was not aware of exactly what he saw, and maybe that was the same; but he was thinking about how smooth the stone felt, imperishable, and slightly warm. Smoother than water or air, or a touched flame—nothing could mar it, and time submitted and crawled beneath its shape.

Then he blinked, and colors were there, a patient choir. He seemed to see two or three hours of the day at once: sunset’s fruiting orchard, afternoon’s hawthorn hedge, and even the blue-shadowed birches of twilight, bred together for a dense sufficiency of field and wood. He looked to the sea, and it blossomed. There was a carpet laid under the keel. And west, forever: a spark of green.

“Well?” said Elwing.

He took the helm. He must look ridiculous; the elaborate fringe of the Nauglamír’s band dipped in at the top of his vision, and scratched his temples. No one seemed in a mood to comment. Elwing kissed the side of his neck, a remote, contained sensation like a rescued memory; he thought, no, I’ll never leave her—not in a light like this. Which collapsed all distance. She had to be near him, one hour out of three.

His men were dispersing back to their posts. He laughed softly into his hand. Elwing had her arms around his waist. “It will work,” he told her, and she said, “Certainly. What else can it do?” She rocked him back and forth as though he was the vessel, she the sea.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[podfic] a double dream](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10607103) by [Chestnut_filly](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chestnut_filly/pseuds/Chestnut_filly)




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